Baby named after me and Elder Mackay!

Good Morning,
Well mom it sounds like you had a greatttttt week!! Mine was a little different it actually didn't "suck" it was actually really really sweet. We got to do a lot of stuff this week that we usually don't get to do very often. On Tuesday we had a way sweet Zone Conference. The Saunders and the Sabey’s had their families in town so at Zone Conference it was really cool to be able to hear from them and their different missions and all that. Then we had a sweet talk from President Sabey about free agency and the fall and the atonement. Man does that guy know some deep stuff. He taught us some deep doctrine and we had a sweet discussion. I thought you might like this. He even told us about how to be good parents and he named three different categories that parents fall under. He said there is the "Drill Sergeant, the Helicopter, and the Consultant". The drill sergeant is the parent who makes the kid do it his way and no other way, or else be punished. The Helicopter is the parent who hovers over the kid until he makes a mistake and then swoops down and fixes everything, and then goes right back to hovering over the kid waiting for him to mess up again. And the consultant is the one who teaches the kid and explains to him the consequences of our actions and what might happen, and then lets the kid have is free agency to make the right decision and learn. He said that the consultant is the one he wants us to be. Which one are you????? Haha

So zone conference was sweet. Wednesday we found out that they are starting the construction on the new chapel in Moree and that we could be of some help by clearing the land with the ward. I can't even begin to tell you the excitement in the Moree ward right now over getting a new chapel. It will be the nicest building in Moree, and the members were asked to help build it so many of them and some of our investigators will be getting jobs and stuff which is sweet. It will take only 5 months to complete and they will be working 24/6. So Wednesday we went on splits with the new ZL that we just got in Cape Coast from Kumasi and we went and cut down weeds with our cutlasses (sword or knife like a machete) for a few hours. I played some golf with a rusty rake and they helped in causing some blisters. Then the next day we went back and did it again and chopped the crap out of a tree with the cutlasses. By the end of Thursday I had so many blisters on my hands it was ridiculous. I counted like 10. But it was a lot of fun. It was nice to have a break from proselyting. Then on Saturday they had this huge Africa service project day where we went with our wards to hospitals and cleaned up the yards and painted and that kind of thing. We even got to wear the Mormon Helping Hands jerseys that they gave out. It was pretty sweet. Thank goodness for the weekend it gave my hands some time to heal. I need to work on getting African hands and not whimpey white people hands.

Kobe and Georgina had a baby and they named it Mackay Adams Abakah. Thought that was pretty sweet. I might even be asked to bless him in church. It’s so sweet to see our new investigators doing well. Well that about sums up the week. We are having a baptism on the 4th of Sept and there will be 5 people being baptized and we are planning to have even more than that in the near future which should be sweet. Everything is going strong. Elder Brown is doing well. He even scored his first goal in soccer today and we won the tournament so he is sitting high on the mountain right now, might take him a while to come down haha. We are getting along great he is a sweet dude. Oh I almost forgot they are starting a new training thing world wide in the missionary work where anyone who is in a leadership position gets to go to these training meetings all the time. But interviews and ZC have been moved to only every 13 weeks now. So we will see how that change goes. I didn’t have much time to study this week with all these crazy things going on so this is all that I came up with this morning for your talk. Pres Heber J Grant. "if the people will pay their tithes and offerings they will not only be blessed in their material affairs but they will be abundantly blessed with increased outpouring of the spirit of the Lord" This is part of the promise the Lord made through his servant Malachi. The Lord will not only open the windows of heaven and pour down spiritual blessings, but he will also preserve our fruits and vegetables, the labor of our hands, from destruction as well. Malachi 3: 8-12 Concerning our fast offerings, President Marion G Romney said "one of the most important things the Lord has told us to do is to be liberal in our payments of fast offerings. I would like you to know that there are great rewards for doing so- both spiritual and temporal. The Lord says that the efficacy of our prayers depends upon our liberality to the poor". Elder Adams "put yourself in the position of those that are in great need of fast offerings. Think about how fast offerings would affect you and your family if you were in that kind of a situation, and if that doesn’t help you pay a generous fast offering and all that you can pay then something is wrong, and you need to take a step back and look at yourself in the mirror" that’s my own personal advice. That’s all I got so maybe you can use something there. Anyway that is all for this week. I love you all so much and can’t wait to hear back from you again next week. Take care and help the work move forward. I pray for you all everyday and love you more than you know.

Love Elder Adams

e-mail 8-16-10

Adams Family,
Well this sucks! I just typed a whole email and when i was going to send it the thing was erased! So now I don’t have very much time to email, so this weeks email will be short. Sorry

Well this week was a good week. We had some good lessons with our investigators. We taught Francis Mensah about baptism and he didn't agree at all with infant baptism and a few other things. He is a very smart man and uses his own intelligence rather than looking to God for answers so things are going to take a long time with him. I read a talk this week by Orson F. Whitney titled Built Upon The Rock. In his talk he explains how Christ’s church is different than ever other church under the sun because Christ’s church runs directly off of revelation from Jesus Christ himself. If the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints does something it is because Christ himself has so commanded. It talks a lot about how we don't do things today because the Jews were commanded to do it in the bible, but we do things because it has been revealed through a prophet. You should look up the talk it is sweet. Anyway I told that all to Francis in one form or another and told him that it will be impossible to accept these things unless he receives his answer through prayer. The human mind can't determine truth, but God can through heart felt prayer. He then told us that he had decided to be an investigator of the church until Dec 2011 haha. He's a character. We had another investigator named Erick Gordon who had an answer to his prayers through, what else, a dream. He had a dream that he was in a pool of water or a big tub thing, which of course I interpreted to be a baptismal font. Then he had another dream that he was standing in our church service a member of the church. He wanted me to interpret it for him, so of course we used it to our advantage and told him that he has been told he needs to be baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. So he will be baptized in the next three weeks. He is a real humble dude.

Now church yesterday was very interesting. We had 9 investigators at church which was sweet. But the funniest thing happened. I sat next to someone from the stake in church and observed him while he was taking notes about the Moree Ward. He made a few notes about the ward on his paper of things that we needed to improve on, and some other notes, but nothing serious. Then the craziest woman in our ward, like she is insane in the head, got up at the end of sacrament to give the closing prayer. Her prayer lasted like 8 minutes long and that is not an exaggeration. And she was shouting at the top of her lungs. Think of all those crazy churches that think they speak in tongues and they just stand there and shout as loud as they can while praying so that everyone can hear them. That is exactly what she did. It was so bad. All of Moree could hear. Then after about 5 min in the whole ward started laughing, including me I couldn’t help it. Then I looked at the stake rep and he just shook his head and walked out, haha. It was bad, but it was hillarious. Bishop Otoo was so mad!
Well anyway the week was a good one, but nothing real special other than that I feel impressed to share. Thanks for all the emails every week it is nice to hear how everything is going back home. Everyone is busy and only getting busier. I love you and remember you in my prayers many times a day. Thanks for all the advice and support. Take care until next week and I can’t wait to hear from you again.
Love Elder Adams
ps. I am working on some photos to send home but I am using Elder Browns camera so it will take small time. I will send photos in a few weeks.

I messed up last weeks blog by posting twice and leaving one out, this has a great story at the end. "We are the Lord's hands"

Family,
Well another week has come and passed. The days feel like weeks, but the weeks feel like days. And they just keep flying bye. I'm actually starting to sense already that I am not going to be able to study everything that I want to on my mission. I am not going to be able to do all that I want to do on my mission. I have plans to read all kinds of things (like the standard works), but with how fast time is going bye I’m not even going to be able to cover half of what I wanted. But that’s okay. I have the rest of eternity. I can become what I want to become, and ill just focus on that. Well things are back to the way they were a few weeks ago. Elder Keller has a new companion, Elder Wiah. He is a way cool guy from Liberia. He is like 6 foot 4 and like the most kind soft spoken giant person I’ve ever met. He is a very good missionary so I am excited to be living with him. I am teaching him "our language". Every morning he says to me "good morning bro" in his deep African voice. Its funny. So he is fitting in nicely.

This week was a really good week for teaching. We have 4 people right now with baptismal dates and maybe 4 or 5 that could be having one very soon. We are planning to have a baptism in like 5 weeks and hope to have about 8 candidates. Our teaching pool is really sweet right now. The reason why it takes a long time to be able to baptize people in Moree and just have a good teaching pool is because about 50% of the people we teach can’t read. And that makes it really hard for them to gain a very strong testimony. We have to base our judgment more off of them coming to church for a long time and then how well they are keeping the commandments and commitments we give them. Oh and that little thing called the spirit. It helps. That is probably one of the things I have noticed is the most difficult to deal with in a village. It takes so much longer for someone to gain a testimony when they can’t read. Teaching people that can read and speak good English is the sweetest thing I have ever experienced. But I would take humble people willing to listen any day, even if it takes a little longer to teach. So glad to be in Ghana.

However, our prayers have been answered. This week we taught a man who spoke amazing English, in fact he is a teacher. He is very intelligent, and he doesn’t like to mess around. Which is sweet for a missionary. We taught him all of lesson one in depth and covered a lot of small detail that we aren’t able to teach are other investigators. Like how the number 7 is symbolic. Throughout the lesson he was watching every movement we made, every comment we said, and everything we taught very carefully. I even noticed a few times where he was trying to trick us. He would ask questions like how tolerant are you of other faiths? Just a lot of stuff like that that we never get in any of are other lessons. It was the most fun enjoyable lesson I’ve ever taught. It is just so sweet to be able to teach people that can have a huge impact on a ward the day they get baptized. And use the church vocabulary I am used to. It was a sweet lesson. By the end he said that he actually loved what we had taught him and that he was very impressed with how well we presented ourselves and the message we carry. He opened up at the end of the lesson and straight up told us that he was trying to stump us, but that now we have his trust. We are going to teach him tomorrow, and he has a DVD player so we are going to watch the Joseph Smith film. I don’t know if I am more excited to teach him, or to just watch a movie for the first time in months! Anyway I am very optimistic about Francis Mensah (hint: that's his name). And boy am I glad that I didn’t slip up in the lesson, because that would have been the end.

We taught another man this week that is a member referral named Ishmael Nkumah. He is also a very smart person who would be a future leader. It is actually really funny why he wants to be a member. He told us that he wants to be a member so that he can be like us and serve a mission. That’s the only thing he saw that interested him in the church right away. He also came to church two weeks ago. We are going to take him proselyting with us this week and have him be are ward missionary and translate for us. So he will be getting taught the lessons while he is teaching other people also, which will be freakin awesome. We will definitely be teaching him on his own, but this will be cool for him to actually get a taste of what it is he wants to do for two years of his life. I guess it’s not a guarantee we haven’t asked him to proselyte yet, but I’m sure he will accept. So anyway the Lord is really blessing us with people who gain a strong testimony fast and will hopefully help out the Moree ward in the future. Our area is doing well.

So one last story I want to throw in before I wrap things up happened yesterday while we were proselyting. We were walking along a dirt road on our way to our next appointment after church, and then it started to rain really hard. So we stopped and waited for sometime underneath the overhang of the nearest building. While we were waiting for the rain to stop a little 5 year old girl was running down the road, on her way home I presume. While she was running she slipped on some mud and took a hard fall right on her face. She laid in the middle of the street crying. There were a lot of people nearby but nobody would stop to help her. It was as if they didn’t see her. I couldn’t just stand there and watch this little girl laying in the street scratched up and crying, so I ran over to where she was and picked her up in my arms and carried her over to the building we were sitting under. I washed her face off with my tie (the one Cody gave me) and then wiped off the rest of her body the best I could. She was still bawlling. I talked to her small in Fante and after a while I was able to cheer her up. I got her to smile and talk a little. When she was smiling again and happy we sent her on her way and continued on. Afterward my tie was covered in thick muddy clay and my shirt was completely covered in mud from top to bottom from carrying her in my arms. The was no white to be found. But I couldn’t have been happier. The only reason I am telling you this is because of the feeling that came to me afterward. I had never felt more in my entire life what it really meant when they say; "We are the Lord’s hands" "We are his servants" "We represent the Savior and do what he would do". I have never felt closer to the Savior. It was a simple and small act of kindness. But I was the Lord’s hands and I was doing what he would have done. I tell you this because we need to always be on the look out for those that are struggling, not only physically, but this because it will bless your life for helping more than it will bless the one in need. I have never been happier in my entire life and felt more joy than what I experienced after helping this little girl.

I have really been getting to know Elder Brown the past few weeks, and the more that I get to know him the more I like him and respect him. He is really really really smart. Which is good for me because I somehow lack in that area haha. He knows a lot about a lot of things, and he is teaching me a lot about like world governments, countries, and just random crap. Don’t worry the gospel too. But it’s really sweet. He already speaks Fante 5 times better than I do, which actually makes me really, really bitter. But I guess that’s what happens when I don’t study it at all haha. Well I guess to sum things up for the week everything is going as good as I could ask for, and the Lord continues to bless us more and more. I have noticed that my emails aren’t very interesting anymore and that I keep writing about the same thing from week to week, so I am trying to add a few new things and spice up these emails a bit.

So it sounds like you are pretty busy Miles? You have grasped the concept of real work it sounds like. What a blessing that will be cuz it’s never going to get easier, but it does get better. And that’s a promise. Whit and Cody sounds to me like you are doing well. I hope that work is doing well. Mom and Dad and Miles it sucks for you that school is starting again hahah. But not for me. Tristin and Derek and Raegan I hope you’re doing well? Sounds like everyone is loving golf and enjoying life. I swear you guys play to much golf now! I’m jealous. I took a few pictures with the jerkey and stuff. I don’t know if they will be good enough, but we still have a few pieces left so we’ll try and get some more sweet pics.

I am grateful for such a great family. I can’t tell you how many times a have thought about why I was so blessed to be a part of this family. I have pondered more about that than anything else on my mission. I don’t know why, but I sure am grateful. I love you all so much and thank God everyday for how merciful he has been to me and to our family. I know that the church is true and that it is the reason why our family is so amazing. We truly are blessed to have the gospel in our lives. Continue to stand strong in all that you do, and remember always, “ remember who you are!!” It will carry you a long way. Much love. Talk to you next week.

Love Elder Adams

Email 8-2-10

Hello Everybody,
Well this week was a sweet sweet week. More so because we had a lot of fun. Just so you know I can’t tell really how good the testimonies are here is Ghana cuz they are all in Fante and I still can’t understand very much. Sometimes I will catch a few things here and there. For the most part I think they are pretty good though they keep them nice and simple. Well this week we had a lot of stuff happen that never really happens. At district meeting the Saunders came to ours and they brought us cake and ice cream which was amazing. Problem was that it destroyed my stomach. Oh and last Friday we went to this place that we found that makes burgers, and they taste better than an American burger, I think just cuz I haven’t had one in so long, so we are going there again today to celebrate my 6 months. They are really expensive, but that 20 dollar bill that I received in my package the other day will go to great use haha. Thanks. I went on spilts again a few times this past week with Elder Keller. He is a funny dude. We got one of our investigators who we have only been teaching for a few weeks to commit to be baptized already after only teaching him for a little more than a week. His wife died about 2 days before we taught him and he has fully accepted everything we have taught him so far. The rest of the week up to Saturday was pretty normal proselyting. We had some good lessons. Saturday was sweet because in the morning instead of going prosleyting we went and played football as a zone against some legit football team that had matching uniforms and the whole deal. It was so fun. But we did get our butts kicked and we lost like 5 to 1 or something like that. At half it was tied, but that didn’t last long. After that we got changed and then had interviews with President a few hours later. Interviews this time around were really sweet. Me and President just talked a lot about like the temple and the temple trip coming up, and about training Elder Brown. It was a very uplifting interview. When we returned later that night though there was something that happened which I don’t know and President came to our apartment and Elder Chesa is now being transferred to Kumasi (4 hours away) and now me and Elder Brown and Elder Keller are in a threesome. So far things are going fine, but I think that Elder Keller gets a new companion today so we don’t have to be in a threesome any longer which will be way sweet. Sunday after church we had a lot of people that we wanted to meet with. So I went with our ward mission leader proselyting, Elder Brown went with another ward missionary, and Elder Keller another. So we had three companionships total in Moree at the same time. We did straight work. It was sweet and two of the boys already have their mission calls so we were able to teach them each a few pointers throughout the day. It was a lot of fun. Elder Brown is doing really well. He knows the area already and has no problem teaching the whole lesson. He is a lot farther along than I ever was at this point. I don’t even feel like I am training him any more he already knows everything I do, so now it is just like a normal companionship. The kid is a stud. I taught one guy on Sunday that I didn’t think was all that serious, but turned out that I was completely wrong. He went on to say at the end of the lesson that he had been to like 8 different churches in Moree and that he had stopped going to all of them because he knew that they were all wrong. And then he said that he hoped he can find something in our church. So the next few weeks are going to be flippin sweet and we are going to give this guy everything that he has ever wanted. He just fell right into our hands, and he is already progressing. I am pretty excited. We will be having a baptism here very soon. We could have some way sweet people, but we still have a lot of work to do with some of them. So we will see, but I’m looking forward to it.
So the week was really good, and a lot of fun. The package was really sweet and thanks a lot for the cereal we really enjoyed. That stuff was good. We are still thinking of some ways that we can take some sweet pictures with the jerky and stuff, so maybe next week we will have some sweet pics for that. It sounds like everything back home is going sweet. Miles you have a real job? That’s sweet, but I just don’t see you and Hadley getting a whole lot done haha. Sounds like you are playing some freakin good golf right now that is sweet. Sounds like fishing was sweet in Lake Tahoe Dad. We are still going to Christmas Island when I get home right? haha. Sounds like you’re having a good time. I’m glad to hear that you guys are taking care of Buck. He really is one of my favorites. That’s good. Well sounds like you guys are all doing great. I didn’t have much to share this week from sweet experiences, but I’m still loving every second of being out here. This place is so awesome and the people are so sweet. I have learned more in these last 6 months than I have my whole life. Keep giving me advice and know that I love you all very much. This is the only true church, the only way back, so live the gospel better every day than the day before, and it will all work out. I love you all. Stay strong!!!!!!!!!
Love Elder Adams

ps. for my birthday get creative. :)